We find a quality akin to this in the burlesque work of George Cruikshank. He is inclined always to moralize with his etching-needle. He dignifies some of his most fantastic and even repulsive scenes with a lofty purpose. Of gentler disposition, and a less ardent politician than Gillray, Cruikshank’s political caricatures are tame when compared with those of the “Georgian Juvenal”; but he had walks and powers which Gillray never approached. Gillray is the rougher, sterner, more audacious genius, reflecting in these qualities the spirit of his times. The son of one of Cumberland’s swearing drinking troopers, who had left an arm at Fontenoy, and was an out-pensioner of Chelsea Hospital at twenty-five, Gillray was brought up in a hardy school. His father, like a true Scot, albeit himself reduced to the position of a sexton, managed to give his boy the rudiments of a sound education. Then seeing that he was for ever poring over the popular plates of Hogarth and the caricaturists of the day, and was nimble with his pencil, he humoured the lad’s bent by placing him under a letter engraver; and so the foundation of his future skill as an etcher was laid. * But he was a Bohemian, and went forth gipsying with strolling players. In this wild school he saw many picturesque and striking aspects and contrasts of life which were of vast consequence to him in after-life. When, tired of the barn stage, and impelled irresistibly by his genius, he threw up the hare’s foot, and obtained admission to the Royal Academy as a student, he entered with a stout heart upon the career in which he was to find, but never to enjoy, lasting fame. The life of Gillray with Mrs. Humphrey and her maid Betsy is one of the saddest records of a man of genius I remember. His habits were dissipated, and he kept low company. He resorted to dishonest shifts, it is said, to obtain money for strong drink. But he remained independent in spirit. * It has been surmised that he afterwards studied under Bartolozzi and Byland. If George Cruikshank had the advantage of Gillray in the teaching of a father who held no mean place in that profession which his son was destined to adorn, Gillray had, so far as we know, the better education, and the help of academical training. The knowledge after which Cruikshank longed, with affecting earnestness and sadness, after he had passed the prime of life, and which he even attempted to master in his decline, was Gillray’s in his youth. Cruikshank saw his master sink and die a dreadful death, a pensioner on the bounty of his publisher, while he himself advanced to take his place, and indeed those of Bunbury and Rowlandson, and his own father.